"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.

That depends on what you define as "good." Sure, as far as number of users goes, theoretically Google Talk is good. After all, everyone who has a Gmail address has a Google Talk address; whether they actually use it or not is another thing entirely. I have been primarily using my e-mail address, for the most part; most of my friends are too stubborn to leave Yahoo! Messenger. And as far as uptime and reliability goes, again--not much can beat the strength of such a massive corporation with seemingly unlimited money to blow on power, servers and system maintenance, so that's all bound to be good on a Google-run server.

But on the other hand, many of these "alternative" XMPP services around the world probably also have perfectly adequate uptimes and reliability. The only problem with them is... well, there's just so many, and they don't have the money and time that a mega corporation like can devote to the service... so you have to actively search for the one that will be the most reliable of the bunch and just trust them to keep the service going.

You also have to consider things like "will they be around five years from now?" But is that really any different from Google, or at least in this case, their XMPP-enabled Google Talk service? I bet years ago when Google Talk was first conceived and started picking up, people didn't stop to think, "will this still be around five years in the future?"

But now the little guys all have one major advantage that Google's service is now losing; the ability to chat with people on a different server without having to sign up multiple accounts. I'm still on my quest to find the "best" XMPP service, and honestly, so far the performance and reliability of the vast majority of them has been pretty damn good. I'm thinking it will take quite some time of evaluation to come to even a halfway-decent conclusion.